Engaging Popular Culture as World-Making: The Everyday Practices of (Re)Storying Histories, Futures, and Positionalities

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel explores how youth and adults participate in speculative worldmaking in their everyday literacy practices through popular culture artifacts. Through speculative worldmaking, creators and audiences use processes of remixing, counter-storytelling and (re)storying to reimagine space and place for themselves and others, and resist institutionalized postcolonial narratives. We ask: How do youth and adults compose and socially organize around speculative worlds? How do their worldmaking interventions offer the potential to reimagine particular (harmful/normative) representations? Our findings emphasize how societal notions of “truth” - historical, social, scientific - are conditional to the worlds we create, share, and inhabit. Highlighting these playful literacies as sites of radical becoming, we discuss how individuals critically understand their histories, futures, and positionalities within cultural narratives.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Media, Culture, and Learning

Chair

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Drawing Anime Into World-Making Practices: A Speculative Reimagination of Bodies, Space, and Place - Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• "Shine Your Eyes": Envisioning the Curricular and Pedagogical Possibilities of Africanfuturism - Oluwaseun Animashaun, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Role-Playing as Critical Revision: Remixing Ideologies of Race, Gender, and Politics in Dungeons & Dragons - Alexander P. Corbitt, SUNY - College at Cortland

• World-Making Beyond the Borderlands: Learning to Read Neocolonialism and Myself as a Filipina American Through Trese - Bianca Licata, Teachers College, Columbia University

Discussant

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University